IPv4 Addresses Are Becoming Scarce in the US

We already know that the internet is expanding at a rapid pace and that we’re soon going to need some infrastructural improvements in order to sustain it. Furthermore, it looks like IPv4 addresses are becoming quite scarce, especially in the US, as the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) recently had to reject a request because of a lack of IPv4 stock. According to John Curran, ARIN chief executive, the US organization activated the IPv4 Unmet Requests policy with a request that was much larger than the available inventory of IPv4 addresses.

This does not mean that IPv4 is now unavailable in the US, just that companies will soon be forced to make smaller requests or wait a while for blocks of address space to become available. ARIN is the largest organization to confirm that it has a limited stock of IPv4, but it is definitely not the first. In 2011, 2012 and 2014, similar organizations in Asia, Europe and Latin America declared similar shortages.

John Curran urged companies to consider moving to IPv6 addresses in the near future, as there are plenty of those just waiting to be picked up. His exact words were: “ARIN encourages organizations to evaluate IPv6 address space for their ongoing public internet network activities.”